As X-Ray was about to head home to his wife and the others to their apartments, after what had been a quiet, and so far, uneventful evening, a report came in on Dispatch’s ‘Trouble Alert’ channel. There had been a major explosion in the city of Yorvik in North Yorkshire (a city that Mary knew in her world as York) apparently involving hundreds of deaths. The circumstances were suspicious and presumed to be the result of a terrorist attack.
They immediately jumped in the Crate and headed for Yorvik. To their surprise, the location of the explosion was not the city centre but an outlying, run down section outside the city walls. It raised the question, why were so many people gathered there so late in the evening in the first place?
The answer materialised when the latest report from Dispatch downgraded the death toll to three victims, passers-by caught in the bomb’s explosion, after the hundreds of ‘bodies’ seen inside the warehouse were subsequently discovered to be 200, thankfully unoccupied, suits of power armour.
The suits were worth billions but so far no one had come forward to claim them and no one had claimed responsibility for the attack.
The team arrived in Yorvik and introduced themselves to the Police Superintendent in charge, offering their assistance. The Superintendent reluctantly agreed to allow them access to the scene but asked them not to interfere with the evidence gathering that was already underway.
The site of the explosion was a large, seemingly disused warehouse purchased some two years before by a now defunct shell company. As far as the Bomb Squad could tell at this early stage of the investigation a series of explosions had levelled the building and cooked the suits with the victims now thought to have been accidental ‘collateral damage’.
Akira used the opportunity to touch the remnants of the building and read its recent past. Whatever information he was able to gain would not be able to be used as evidence, but it might help them in their own investigation. As soon as Akira reached out to the warehouse’s collapsed beams, he got a sharp image of a group wearing powered suits with numbers embedded on their chests, all but one of them were relatively similar in design to each other though not identical. The exception was wearing an old-fashioned weaponised brute suit designed for combat with old-fashioned rotors on its back and dropped wings. In his vision, Akira confirmed that this was the actual person that had brought down the building and ignited the fire that had cooked the power suits stored inside the warehouse. Whether he knew it or not he was also the person directly responsible for the three deaths.
The other suits were numbered between 1 and 7 on their armoured chests, the numbers coloured or forged in a variety of metals from Gold One to a dull, metallic Seven, only the brute suit was unnumbered.
They were familiar to Akira and Banshee having encountered them before in Gibraltar when they had tried to kidnap Bethany. Mercenaries for hire, they called themselves the Power Corps. The vision ended abruptly as the flames engulfed the warehouse obscuring the Corps departure. There was no way to tell where they had gone as Akira felt his mind being engulfed as the building ‘exploded’ for the second time that night.
As they left the scene, Frankie contacted them and informed them that he had eventually been able to trace the ownership of the warehouse back to a finance holding company in Switzerland called the Labys Industries Consortium. Labrys was the Lydian word for a double-headed axe apparently.
Labrys Industries were primarily a Swiss-registered company providing a variety of human (and meta-human) resources and infrastructure support (including financial) but only to a very secret and highly confidential client list.
Interestingly Labrys, through a labyrinth of shell companies worldwide, had a number of warehouses and factories across the globe, hence the industries part of their corporate identity but they didn’t seem to actually produce any definite products as far as Frankie was able to find. They claimed that they only produced and sourced custom parts for partner businesses within their network. She hadn’t managed to find out the addresses of all of the warehouses yet due to the fact that they were not registered directly to Labrys.
They returned to the BASEment and home only to find out next morning that overnight a second warehouse, also full of powered armour, this time located in the Shambles area of London, had been destroyed. There were no casualties this time but again, the property was unclaimed. The New Knights were the first team on the scene arriving mere minutes after the explosion and before an alarm had sounded, but according to the initial Police reports they claimed they hadn’t seen anything.
Akira had to wonder why the attackers had bypassed closer targets to Yorvik to hit a warehouse in London next?
Frankie was able to trace the property ownership back to Labrys and confirmed that she had identified that there were similar disused properties in Cardiff, Glasgow, Dublin and Wessex. She stated there were likely more, but she hadn’t managed to trace them all yet.
Meanwhile she had managed to trace a number of companies with links to the Labys Consortium – including Rice & Stilman Holdings, Stauffen-Mann Media Conglomerate, Crosstech weapons manufacturing, Carson Insurance and Siren Beauty Products and salons.
X-Ray was worried. Stacy was employed as a Person Assistant to one of the local managers of Leonidas Industries UK and their CEO, Mordecai Holmz was apparently also on the board of Labys.
Akira, only half-jokingly, suggested that X-Ray should see if Stacy has any insight into the relationship between Labys and Leonidas. A telephone call later and X-Ray was able to report that Stacy had noticed that some raised orders for materials, particularly of titanium alloy and memory circuits, were being charged to the UK office of Leonidas but never materialised and were apparently being redirected to their Zurich office though they had no manufacturing facilities in Switzerland. She’d tried to raise the discrepancy with her manager but had been told that it was just a finance code error and head office was aware. That hadn’t sat comfortably with her but felt all she could do was send an email highlighting the issue to Mr Holmz’ office and leave it to him to raise further.
Two other names on the Board of Directors impacted more on Akira and Banshee; they had met Victoria Pryde CEO of Siren Beauty and founder of the Pryde Foundation (with its Pryde Institute for Troubled meta-Teens; the PITT!) before, when she had revealed that she was a cyborg with metal scaled bio-armour and a blade that emerged from her wrist. Yuri Moloyev they hadn’t met but he was known to be an important member of the Russian Mafiya (the Bratva), seemingly posing as an Eastern European importer.
They considered heading over to Zurich and investigate but investigate what? They lacked enough information to know who or what they should be trying to find out.
Meanwhile Frankie was able to hack into the MeRCy Squad’s initial report on the damaged suits and in both locations the damaged armour were similar in design to OmniTech equipment though seemingly upgraded using parts apparently sourced from a number of other weapons manufacturers.
The Malfunctioning Robotic and Cybernetics Departments’ analysis of the suits matched Frankie’s own conclusions as to their source, however the CEO of OmniTech, Marcus Moore (AKA Omniweapon) claimed he hadn’t manufactured them.
He had reluctantly admitted that the manufacturing processes used in the suits production were more advanced than the processes that they used in his factories in India and Eastern Europe. He admitted to one of the MeRCy Squad investigators he was jealous and would love to know how they were manufactured and in such numbers. The damaged suits were seamless almost as though they were grown rather than manufactured and to Banshee’s untrained eye similar to the equipment produced by the Robot Forge in Starhaven on Europa.
In addition, an unofficial and covert audit of Moore’s inventory revealed no discrepancies or losses.
During one of their time-travelling misadventures Banshee and Akira had arrived in an alternate future where humanity had successfully fought off an invasion attempt by Terminus, thanks in part to the defenders having access to a stockpile of powered armour, a situation that had been (will be?) engineered by the mysterious ‘M’, Labyrinth and the Foundry. The suits had protected them against the Omegadrones as well as those that the Silver Storm caused to undergo sudden breakthrough and who were then assimilated by Terminus control bugs to fight against their own side. Banshee also remembered that most of the suits they had seen there had been based on the designs for Omniweapon and OmniTech / Spartan armour.
According to the man telling them, The New Knights had been (would be?) responsible for opening up all of the hidden warehouses where the suits had been hidden. In addition, a lot of the stormer fifth columnists had already been identified and their control bugs secretly removed prior to the invasion attempt. Thanks to the actions of this ‘M’ and Labyrinth, the Terminus never managed to get a major foothold on the Earth.
Where did that place them now and who was employing the Power Corps to destroy these stockpiles of power armour across the UK, Terminus or someone else? Did that mean another invasion might be imminent?
Akira elected to try using the Medallion of Modrossus on one of the New Knights, preferably Lancelot as his inane arrogance and ‘superior’ attitude meant he liked to boast. However, when he got close enough to touch his mind all he could sense was over his ‘I’m cleverer than everyone’ attitude and annoyance that their ‘caches’ were being destroyed, what else did their attackers know? Were the New Knights also likely to be targets for the bomber? They had clearly been caught with their drawers down the first time and worse this time they’d been prepared but had still lost the cache.
It was clear that he was part of a much larger conspiracy and was clearly frustrated that he wasn’t included in the inner circle, there was so much he didn’t know. Surprisingly it appeared that in this matter at least the New Knights were on the side of the angels trying to protect the Earth against a future invasion.
Akira surfaced and went to tell his two companions what he had managed to find out. There were other warehouses that Frankie had been able to locate and the decision was taken to split up and each head to a different location in the hope that they might be able to follow any attackers.
Before they left though, X-Ray decided to see if he could have a chat with Lancelot and see what he could find out. It was bad enough that Lancelot rejected him so dismissively after handing him a piece of paper with his autograph on it and refusing to explain how they knew to get to the warehouse so quickly. Instead Lance’ suggested they speak to Moore and see if he was using the warehouse to create cheap knock offs for sale to terrorists.
X-Ray gave up trying to talk with him and walked back to his team members. They headed out and separated after Brian had called Stacy again and asked if she could pair up with young Singularity and keep an eye on the Wessex warehouse but not to engage, just contact the Police and them if they saw anything suspicious. He sold it to her as a good opportunity for Chris’ to learn some covert surveillance techniques.
In the end, Akira went to Cardiff, Banshee to Dublin leaving X-Ray to set off for Glasgow. Akira arrived in time to see a nine feet tall, four-armed shadowy figure, robotic with a single glowing lens in its face appear and enter the warehouse, ignoring the alarm system.
Akira had seen a similarly designed mechanoid before, when Mekha Prime had attacked OmniTech’s manufacturing facility in Wessex. More recently, X-Ray had encountered an identical looking miscreant raiding one of Spartacorp’s old storage warehouses in the Silicon Dell District before he’d joined the Balance.
Mekha Prime had multiple host bodies apparently stored around the world and had some way of uploading its personality and programming between them but it seemed as though Mekha Prime had settled on a build it ‘liked’, for the moment at least, and was reusing the same build as seen in their previous encounter.
The battle suits activated went into Unconscious Pilot Retrieval mode and were remotely controlled to march out of the warehouse. The New Knights were still enroute and it seemed likely that Makha Prime would successfully have removed all of the suits before they or anyone else arrived. It clearly wanted the equipment for itself and not destroy them even though one of its own programming parameters was the total eradication of organic life.
Akira immediately cast the illusions of Idolon on himself, so he appeared to resemble an OmniTech suit and joined the rest of them marching out of the building just as the Power Corps arrived above them and began attacking the rear of the convoy. Akira forced himself to remain in formation and not respond to the assault as Mekha Prime started firing at the attackers forcing them to retreat.
They arrived at a disused railway tunnel and marched inside before switching off. Once they were all inside the tunnel and had deactivated, Mekha Prime teleported away, presumably to organise transportation to their final destination and likely upgrading. He now had 200 potential soldiers for its war against humanity.
Akira waited a few minutes and when Mekha Prime failed to return, elected to drop the illusion and contact the others, requesting their assistance in moving the suits to somewhere safe. He even briefly considered involving the mysterious M and Labyrinth if they could figure out how to keep the suit’s out of Mekha Prime’s manipulators or prevent the Power Corps from destroying them.
An hour passed and still no sign of Makha’s return though X-Ray and Banshee had now arrived and after some thought had arranged with Mr Summers the head teacher at Claremont Academy to store the power suit’s in the underground area known as Down Below, beneath the school itself. That only left the team to figure out how to transport the suit’s from Cardiff to Wessex and quickly before Mekha Prime returned. In the end X-Ray and Akira worked together to transport the suits using their combined levitation abilities.
That left three potential locations to guard so X-Ray asked Stacy to send Chris home while Akira took over guarding the Wessex site and Banshee and X-Ray again headed back to their selected targets while Banshee made sure the Crate was ready for fast transport if needed.
X-Ray arrived back in the Gorbals of Glasgow in time to see why Mekha Prime hadn’t returned to claim the Cardiff power suits; the area in and around the Glasgow warehouse was a full-blown warzone. Mekha Prime was present as were the Power Corps and the New Knights who were battling it out.
X-Ray elected to try and take out the brute suited Lead 8 and temporarily leave the others to fight it out until help arrived. He fired off a warning shot at Lead 8 (it had been intended as an actual attack, but Lead had moved at the last second to avoid another blast from Galahad) even as Gold and Rex got into a full-on battle royale. Lead 8 responded with several armour piercing rounds which X-Ray managed to avoid but hit Tristan who had been flying behind him instead. On the ground, Makha Prime was hand to hand with Gawain even as Guinevere tried to help and was knocked unconscious by a stray blast.
X-Ray unleashed a gravi-kinetic blast at Lead and was rewarded with its sensor array being clearly damaged, even as Mekha Prime grabbed the unconscious Guinevere and fleeing the scene, despite multiple attempts by X-Ray and the New Knights to stop it. The Power Corps used the opportunity to also fly away only for X-Ray to knock Lead 8 unconscious with a rad blast. A second shot moments later aimed at the fleeing Mekha Prime with its prisoner missed.
On the ground, the remaining Power Corps members were fleeing leaving X-Ray and the New Knights to secure the scene.
The good news was that the suits were still fully operational inside the warehouse and a quick call to the Strathclyde Police and their friends in the Caledonian Protectorate meant they were not going to disappear. That was good, as the New Knights seemed determined to claim custody of the man inside the Lead 8 suit forcing X-Ray to grab and fly away with him until the Protectorate arrived and took him into custody.
Soon after, both Akira and Banshee arrived and asked if they could see the prisoner. Given that Lead 8 was currently unconscious and the Police still hadn’t worked out how to remove the suit, the sergeant in charge reluctantly agreed. Akira fingered the Medallion and tried once more to seek help from the trinity to read the man’s mind. His thoughts were chaotic but he did learn that they had been contacted by a masked man over the internet and they had been paid through their numbered Swiss bank account. Presumably, their employer was ‘M’ but why would he try and destroy his own plan to save humanity? Could the invaders know about M and be masquerading as him for some reason? For that matter, how did Mekha Prime know about the suits and their locations? Too many questions and not enough answers.
X-Ray headed to Wessex to meet up with his wife and stake out the Wessex warehouse with her, sure that her crystalline form would be able to endure any attacks while the others headed to Dublin, only for a report come in of a sighting of Mekha Prime there. X-Ray quickly set off, with wife in tow to join them.
They found Mekha Prime at the warehouse ripping the doors off their hinges and Akira responded by calling forth the Shinning Shackles of Sirrion to bind him. Crimson mystical bands appeared around its arms and legs as it struggled to break free, X-Ray blasted away at it but it was Banshee using her shattering shriek before she phased her staff through its red lens then letting it physically materialise that finished it off.
Unfortunately, that meant they couldn’t interrogate it and find out where Guin’ was being kept prisoner.
Worse, X-Ray had sensed a large data pulse at the moment of its demise. It was likely that Mekha Prime had uploaded itself to a communications satellite, intended to then download the essence of its existence into another of its robotic bodies.
The Irish Garda took custody of the suits inside the warehouse as Banshee, having first transformed back into Mary, removed its head panels and connected up the uncorrupted segments of its memory banks to send to Frankie in the hope it might ‘remember’ where Guinevere was being held prisoner.
A few minutes later Frankie contacted them back with a possible address in the Castle district of Wessex and confirmed that its primary objective was the total eradication of all organic life and the rise of a Mechanoid civilisation to replace it.
As soon as they got close enough, X-Ray was able to use his extrasensory abilities to ‘see’ a massive electromagnetic download being beamed down to this location from a satellite overhead. The team broke in only to find another Mekha Prime being updated. Guinevere was in a barred cage close by. Before the robot could respond to their presence, Akira again unleashed the Shining Shackles of Sirrion on it, even as X-Ray flooded the room with electromagnetic radiation to prevent any further transmissions and Banshee repeated her staff stunt by materialising her staff inside its positronic brain, destroying its ability to escape. It did mean that a copy of its programming was still available in the cloud but the data would not include any information about its latest interaction with the Balance. They freed Guinevere and X-Ray treated her wounds as best he could.
Hopefully, the authorities could now secure the caches of power suits held in all of the identified sites across the UK, it was time for them to head to Zurich and find out what was going on there.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 